NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Review: Bringing Balance To The Force
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2013 8:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Our final game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Civilization V is an interesting game due to the fact that it puts the 7790, GTX 650 Ti Boost, and 7850 so close together in performance. It stresses just about everything at some point – tessellation/geometry, ROP throughput, compute, and texturing – but it’s really shading/texturing that form the biggest bottleneck here. This works out well enough for NVIIDA, allowing them to get within 4% of the 7850, while still keeping the GTX 650 Ti Boost and GTX 660 well separated.
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royalcrown - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
yeah, but the $$$ of a 660 is dropping every week, i just dont really see the point of the 650 ti when you have the 650 and 660 and they all have overclocked versions as well. a few places have the 2 gig 660 for $199.00royalcrown - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
well, if the new 650 is 149, then I guess that'd be a great price preformance vs the 660. I suppose it depends on what they cost in real life.SAAB_340 - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Is it just me thinking the 1GB model might be a bad idea given that these cards with the 192bit memory bus have asymetrical memory placement. The card only has 768MB of the memory at full bandwidth while the last 256MB will only give a 3rd of the bandwidth. (it's the same with the 2GB card but there 1.5GB has full bandwidth.) 768MB is not much with todays standards. Looking forward to the test showing how much that will impact on performance.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
It's absurd, just like the AMD 1 GB card that was just announced. I've read that Skyrim with high resolution textures needs 2 GB at minimum and I doubt most people consider Skyrim a high-end game.Parhel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
The high resolution texture pack didn't really affect memory usage that much when I installed it. It was below 1GB both before and after. That's at 2560x1600, no AA. Maybe with mods it's a different story, but I think if you're trying to show where 1GB hits a wall, you'd be better off starting with a different game.mczak - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Personally I'd think it would make more sense to just have a 1.5GB card (at say right between the 149$ of the 1GB model and the 169$ of the 2GB model). All the same performance characteristics as the 2GB model (as you say the those asymmetric configurations are a little dubious or at least suspect anyway) while being cheaper. But marketing doesn't like 1.5GB cards (and as intended competitor of 7850 2GB of course "looks" much better).drew_afx - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
How about Performance per dollar(retail) comparison for these very similarly spec'd cards?Make up some metric for 3d games(dx9/10/11), encoding/decoding, OpenCL, etc
Because a lot of games are CPU intensive, for potential buyers, FPS comparison on a specific benchmarking setup is not going to reflect equally in real life.
Also if a game can run 60+min. fps & maybe 75fps avg., then the card is as good as it can get for average people. This comparison proves X is better than Y when used with top of the line CPU Mobo RAM combo, but thats it. Many don't go for $2000+ gaming computer setup and put sub $170 GPU in it. What about overclocking potential? It's like comparing non-K cpu to unlocked one (just to put it in a perspective)
CiccioB - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Still, the game list is quite obsolete.It is not time to replace Crysis: warhead with Crysis3 and Dirt: Showdown with Dirt3?
And adding Skyrim? Last Tomb Raider?
Gamers would like to know how today games run on these cards, not only if one GPU is faster than another playing ancient games with obsolete engines.
This thing has already been pointed out during Titan's review. There someone suggested that games choice has been made to review games that are better on AMD rather than nvidia GPUs.
However, no answer was made, either to give reasons on why so many old obsolete games or whether the list was going to be changed/enlarged.
Still, new games are not considered for no apparent reason.
After having spent so many efforts in upgrading the site's appearance, which I like very much, it would be nice also to spend a bit of time to make a new game benchmark suite. It's 2013 and many games have been published after Crysis: warhead and Dirt: showdown.
Thanks in advance
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link
We'll be adding two more games next month (or whenever I can find the time to validate them). Crysis: Warhead isn't going anywhere since it's our one legacy title for comparing DX10 cards to. And DiRT: Showdown is newer than DiRT 3, not older. It was Showdown that we replaced 3 with. Skyrim was also removed, since it's badly CPU limited on higher-end cards.medi01 - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - link
Any reason 7850 and not 7790 (direct competitor) is marked black?